NO "HAMLET" TODAY: INSTEAD, CHE GUEVARA!

That's Che Guevara and Fidel way back when, after the Cuban Revolution. Boy, Che looked good in pictures. Come to think of it, so did Fidel. Communist leaders like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Kim Jong-il looked horrible in photos, but the camera loved these guys. They looked like somebody you could joke with...somebody it would be fun to pal around with.

Che in particular got a reputation for being cool. Rock musicians and Hollywood stars used to wear Che t-shirts. That's (above) Carlos Santana sporting his at an Oscar ceremony.

That's (above) Johhny Depp wearing his.

Johnny Depp isn't a communist. I imagine he just saw Che as a symbol of rebellion against the Man, and maybe of his belief that communism, if it does nothing else, at least feeds the poor.

I don't think that's true, but at least I understand why somebody would believe that. What I don't understand is why Che would be the focus of that belief.  Che was a food destroyer, not a food creator. He and Fidel turned an up and coming country into an economic basket case. Before the revolution Cuba had a higher per capita income than Austria, Japan, and Spain. It had the third highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere. What has it been since the revolution? It's a poor country which requires the dollars sent from relatives living in exile to prevent disaster.

It's time to ask some questions: when has communism ever made a country rich? Was China better off under Mao's communism or under the present state capitalism? Was India better off under Nehru's socialism, or under capitalism? Who's feeding their people better, North or South Korea? Remember how everybody predicted economic doom for Chile when Allende was kicked out? Today it's one of the most successful countries in South America. Look at post-war Vietnam. Why would anyone who cares about the poor have anything good to say about communism?

But I digress from my topic, which is Che. I hate to say it, but Che was not a nice guy. He was a Stalinist. He couldn't sign the death orders fast enough. Che's Cuba hated rock and roll, which they regarded as American music, and had young people beaten and arrested for wearing long hair. Gays were put into a forced labor camp with a sign over the gate that read, "WORK WILL MAKE A MAN OUT OF YOU." He had utter disdain for blacks...all this, and yet only a short time ago he was the darling of American Rock and Roll. Go figure.

But...I have to admit...he took a good picture.

BTW: My information about Che comes from a book I'm reading now called "Exposing The Real Che Guevara" by Ernesto Fontoya.

A READING FROM "HAMLET"

I'd intended to put up my own reading of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, but I had too much wine at dinner and I buggered it up. Let me try again tomorrow morning. I'll put it up during the day on Monday. 

VACATION!

Boy, that Western Town post was one of the least popular that I ever did. Oh well, you can't win 'em all. Maybe I need a vacation to get my perspective back. I'll take off til Monday 8/8/11 and see if that helps. I still have major computer problems, so that'll keep me busy. See ya' then!

THE ARCHITECTURE OF WESTERN TOWNS

I love Westerns, especially the ones by Sergio Leone.

I always find myself peeking over the shoulders of the actors at the beautiful town behind them. Western towns are great! They make a powerful statement, even though most towns like that were little more than villages.

Since most American cowboys were of European descent, you'd think that the Western villages would have resembled the old European models (above), but they didn't. Maybe that's because Europeans lived in their villages and the frontiersmen didn't. Our frontier towns were mostly commercial properties. People did most of their living in the outback.

So why were Western buildings built shoulder-to-shoulder in long, straight strips? It doesn't seem like a very practical design from the point of view of fire prevention. If one store burned down, they probably all burned down. Maybe it was a useful design for breaking the wind and dust that came off the prairie. I'm not sure.

If I had to guess I'd say that the design came out of the ethnic origins of the cowboys. Most were English, Irish and Scots, and Britons in the Old Country loved those kind of linked-up, row house structures (above). Even the U.K. Prime Minister lives in a row house!

But wait...where did those tall colonnades (above) come from? I could swear I've seen them somewhere before....wait a minute...they're all over the place in New Orleans! Holy Mackerel! Does that mean Western towns were influenced by New Orleans!? It's not as crazy as it sounds. Wasn't N.O. considered a frontier town way back when? Maybe it influenced the template.  It sounds like we're talking about British row house structures trimmed with French American colonnades!

Of course clean, designer-driven towns like the one above may have existed only in movies. Real old frontier towns weren't as photogenic.

Maybe the exception was Dodge City, Kansas. That always looked pretty good relative to other Western towns. No wonder Wyatt Earp wanted to live there.

Notice the colonnades. You can argue that they were there only there to protect pedestrians from the sun, but that's only half true. Notice how high they are. If protection from the sun was the only consideration, they'd be lower. My guess is that people thought a high colonnade was classy...like The French Quarter in New Orleans, or the old Southern Plantation house facades. In fact, I wonder if the colonnades made people in the pre-Civil War North East antsy because they indicated a Southern influence on the frontier, and the possible extension of slavery to the territories.

But I'm digressing from the point I wanted to make: that Westerners may have perceived their structures not as shacks, but as cutting-edge symbols of cultural refinement. The buildings came out of their belief that they were spreading high culture to the wilderness.

Here's (above) a slightly later picture of Dodge. I guess the city had a lot of strangers passing through and the locals thought it wouldn't hurt to advertise. I wouldn't be surprised if the townspeople regarded the glitzy street with awe, the way we think of The Miracle Mile in Las Vegas now. We see a dirty, gritty town, but I'll bet the proud inhabitants saw Disneyland.

Here's (above) Tombstone, Arizona. It looks like Dodge. My guess is that Dodge impressed people so much that everybody wanted their town to look just like it: British row house-type structures with fancy French, Southern trim and lots of those exciting, beautiful, modern signs.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Westerners regarded those signs almost as works of art. They probably got sentimental about them. It can't be an accident that even tiny, remote towns had beautiful, hand-lettered signs.

Here's Tuscon (above), which is also in Arizona, but which was built on the Mexican/Spanish model. The oldest buildings are mostly Adobe and mud brick, which made sense given that the town was in a desert. Even so, my guess is that cowboys preferred what they considered the eye-dazzling, high culture glitter of the Dodge model.

BTW: what do you think of that wide, arid, sun-exposed center space? Maybe they needed it for cattle, or horse auctions. I hope it had some kind of practical purpose, because it sure is an eyesore. You'd think that desert dwellers would be better at creating shade.

I'm amazed that so many of these God-forsaken desert towns had fancy saloons. Walking into one of these places after a day in the dust must have been like entering a starship. The bars even staged Shakespeare! Oscar Wilde went on a poetry-reading tour of frontier towns like this!

Truly, humans are amazing creatures! We don't mind baking in the sun all day, and doing strenuous, boring work, so long as we can periodically indulge our vices and fortify ourselves with romantic, exciting, Utopian visions!

ALL THINGS CARL BARKS

I stumbled on a great Carl Barks comics site on the internet, only I forgot to bookmark it, and now I can't find it. Anyway it was great to be reminded of what a terrific storyteller Barks was. His best stories, like the Uncle Scrooge "Klondike" story pulled no punches. In Klondike he seemed to tell kids that getting rich was doable but hard work and great sacrifice were the price, and kids should man up so they'll be ready to do battle when enormous difficulties come their way.

In the Northern gold fields Scrooge encounters Glittering Goldie, the only love of his life, and she steals from him.

Scrooge forces her to repay him. He puts her to work digging for him. They both live together in the same shack til the debt is paid. Try to imagine the modern Disney corporation printing stories like this!

The site talks a lot about bloopers in the stories...little nitpicky things like Donald's car (above) having a windshield in one panel and no windshield at all in the next.

BTW: I LOVE the design on Donald's little red convertible! Somebody should build a real car that looks like that. Wait a minute. They did! Thanks to Glenn for the cool picture.

Anon sent a picture of a late 30s Bantam Roadster, which may have been the inspiration for Donald's car. The end of the link dropped out, so I didn't get to see Anon's photo, but I looked up the car on the net and discovered lots of terrific pictures.

Back to Barks' bloopers: sometimes they were glaring. Here (above) Barks adds a fourth nephew for one panel only, just to add to the weight it takes to hold a man down.

Barks was proud that he was able to work what he called his "cynical" worldview into his stories. He created Gladstone Gander (above), the lucky friend of Donald who never has to work hard for anything. We all know and secretly envy somebody like that. Gladstone reminds me of the character Al Pacino played in David Mamet's "Glengarry, Glen Ross". Come to think of it, Scrooge reminds me of the character John Wayne played in "Red River."

The site has plenty to say about Barks' wife Gare, a landscape painter (sample above) whose pictures convey enormous good cheer.

That's (above) Gare when she was young. Wow, she was a looker!

In her retirement years Gare ceased to look like a babe, and morphed into something even better...the sweetest person you could ever hope to meet; a first-rate human being. Thanks to Milt Gray I was able to spend an afternoon with Carl and Gare and was taken by how much they seemed to enjoy each other's company. I'm so happy that she and Carl found each other.

Carl recommended me to his friend Mik, the artist who did the newspaper comic strip "Ferd'nand."  Mik was looking for an assistant to help draw the strip, and offered to give me a tryout. Wow! What an opportunity! Unfortunately I had to decline. I'd only recently discovered Clampett and my mind was full of the possibilities offered by funny, full animation.

Let me take a stab at the site where I got all these Barks pictures...could it have been this one?
http://www.cbarks.dk/indexint.htm

LITERARY COMPARISONS

I hope readers will indulge me with just one more post on the subject of literary comparison. I love battles between writers. The way to do it is the way it's done here, with two paragraphs side by side, and with each writer describing the same thing. Battles like this get bloody. Reputations are won and lost. It's not for the faint of heart.

Here's the first comparison, from Ayn Rand of all people. In an essay In "Romantic Manifesto" Rand compares a passage by literary novelist Thomas Wolfe (above, top right),  and one by down-and-dirty pulp novelist Mickey Spillane (above, top left). She prefers Spillane. See what you think. Both writers attempt to describe New York city at night. 

Thomas Wolfe: "The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, a city of night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match."

Mickey Spillane: "The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy yellow lights off in the distance" 

Rand comments: "There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane's description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness." Wolfe, she argues, uses only estimates, "and in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities."

Here's (below) another interesting comparison, two versions of the first paragraph of Genesis. I'm only comparing line number two ("And the Earth..."), but I'll start with the first four lines just to put everything in context: 

<< Genesis 1 >> King James Version 1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Okay, here's the comparison: GOD'S WORD® Translation (©1995) The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep water. The Spirit of God was hovering over the water. King James Bible And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Obviously the King James version is superior...but why? Well for one thing, "formless and empty" is merely descriptive. The KJ version milks more drama by dividing "formless" into two words, and contracts "empty" into the more masculine, one-syllable word, "void," creating more contrast, and giving us a deeper sense of loss. "Darkness was upon the face of the deep" is pure genius. Who'd have thought the deep could have a face, but it works. Anything that does something to a face gets our attention.   "The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" is even purer genius! Imagine the spectacle of a miles long face of God cruising at awesome speed above the sea, regarding what He created. And there's that word "face" again! If only it were possible to know who wrote/translated this version! I wish there was a whole book of comparisons like this. Imagine how much you could learn from it! BTW: Don't confuse Thomas Wolfe (above), the novelist who wrote "Look Homeward, Angel",  with Tom Wolfe, the author of "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

MY FAVORITE POEM

Greetingth, Poetry Loverth! I thought I'd post my new favorite poem...if you can call it a poem...."The Rose of Sharon" from Song of Solomon 2:1, in The King James Bible. I'd have preferred a good dramatic reading on film, but I couldn't find any...nothing first-rate anyway. I couldn't find any masterpieces of painting to illustrate the subject, either. It's odd that one of the world's greatest love poems inspired no great art. I put up some only vaguely relevant pictures of Solomon above and below, and I guess they'll have to suffice. Oh, well...we have the text, and that's the important thing: << Song of Solomon 2 >> King James Version 1I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.2As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. 3As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. 4He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. [Note: The rose of Sharon? The lily of the valleys? Boy, this author has a knack for words that stick in the mind. "So is my love among the daughters" is so much better than the merely factual "So is my love among the young women." The metaphor of the apple tree is terrific, and so is "his banner over me was love." A couple of random points: some of the words in the body of the poem are italicized...I don't know why, since emphasizing them buggers up the sound. And if you're reading the poem out loud, I would emphasize the second syllable in "Sharon" because it sounds better that way.] 5Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. 6His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. 7I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please. [Note: "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples" is pure word music. I assume that "sick of love" means something like "dizzy with love," which is a good thing. Charging by the roes and hinds is a brilliant formulation. It seems to acknowledge the magical  power and beauty of nature. Her command to the other women has great force because she summons nature to back her up.] 8The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. 9My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice. 10My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. 11For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; 12The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; [Note: As a cartoonist, line 8 is skewered for me because I can imagine the way Don Martin would have drawn it. It's still a beautiful image, though. I forgive the "voice of the turtle" reference...turtles don't have voices, do they?...but why quibble?] 15Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. 16My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. 17Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bethel. [Note: That's it, that's the end. I have no idea why the boyfriend wants to take vine-eating foxes with him, but the word music here is so powerful that it transcends literal meaning. I deleted lines 13 and 14 just to make the passage shorter. You can read the whole passage here:  http://kingjbible.com/songs/2.html (Forgive the weird spacing above...I'm having computer problems) A beautiful poem, huh? I wish poetry readings were sometimes done by professional actors reading classic poems like this one. If they were, maybe they'd be better attended. BTW: if you follow the link to the site that I stole this from, you'll discover that clicking on the blue line numbers in the King James Version will take you to a long list showing how other translators handled the same line. Boy, what a difference! If you're a student of good writing, I know of no better textbook than these comparisons! Also BTW:  Animation Insider just put up an interview of me on their site: http://www.animationinsider.com/2011/07/eddie-fitzgerald/